NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

supreme skill could have exhibited within these limits the
seven years of action which have to seem at once long enough
to constitute a cycle of penance and brief enough to present
a drama of which all the parts knit solidly together under the
spectator's eye. Something more than mere technical devices,
however, rounds out and compacts the (story—something
more than the scrupulous disposition of tableaux and the
recurrence of that overshadowing symbol which is sewed upon
Hester's bosom and burned upon Dimmcsdalc's; which is sig-
nificantly and exquisitely woven into Pearl's very nature, and
which, rather too artificially, is once blazoned upon the sky.
Hawthorne gives every evidence of having moved through
his first and greatest long romance with an unfaltering stride,
never obliged to consider how he should construct because
the story grew almost of itself, and never at a loss for sub-
stance because his mind was perfectly stored—neither too
much nor too little—with the finest materials of observation
and reflection gathered during a lifetime. For three years
he had written almost nothing; now all the power that he had
unconsciously hoarded freed itself and flowed into his book;
now all the quarter-century of discipline in form and texture
effortlessly shaped an abundant flood.

The historian should not hint at too much that is merely
mystical in the making of The Scarlet Letter; it is an achieve-
ment of deliberate art grown competent and unconscious by
careful exercise. At the same time, the impact which the story
makes may be traced back of Hawthorne's own art and per-
sonality to the Puritan tradition which, much as he might
disagree with it on occasion, he had none the less inherited.
An ancestral strain accounts for this conception of adultery
as an affair not of the civil order but of the immortal soul
The same strain in his constitution, moreover, led him to make
of these circumstances more than the familiar triangle, A
Frenchman might have painted the joy of Dimmesdale, the
lover, with his forbidden mistress; an Italian might have traced